Author: doodledweller
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Poetry
Some folks, including myself, find it difficult to understand poetry. A big part of it is sentence structure, which does not align closely to speech the way a novel does. Classical poetry conforms to rules and forms, but modern poetry, especially the free-verse kind, hardly does. Another reason is missing context, the lack of knowledge…
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Banks’ Rose
I was at a river of chocolateThere she was, Banks’ Rosethousands upon thousandstiny bouquets dangling like wind-chimesfleeting, fragile, delicate. I stand with her at a T-junction,where time standsstretching thininvisible. She’ll soon dieBut I’ll be here,waiting for the rose and her fragrant, soft petalslingering around just enough to be solovable, magical, fantastical.
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Ode to the Octopus
Eight limbsShe’s not simply crawlingShe is the Kraken that watches the waterlike she’s got eight eyes,circling her universefor every lump, every bump, every slit, every crack. So watch out when she comesshe is the Medusa of the seapivoting, sucking on her preywrapping enemies into her wombdrowning them in ink so black they’d wonderif it were…
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Juniper for Jupyter
My mind is stuffed, likea holiday turkey, full of breadand celery and spicesof a lifeTwo scores, and then some So forgive the mind, if it takesColdplay for Cold StoneJuniper for Jupyter Though I’ve wondered, Has it figured out the shortest pathto reach the deepest corner,the oldest door isloosely coupledwith iambs and rhymesheuristicallyapproximatelyprobabilistically Once upon a…
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ML for Creative Writing, Cont.
“You shall know a word by the company it keeps!” is the historically common approach to linguistic modeling. It uses word vectoring, or word embedding, to train a set of word vectors based on a large corpus of text. With each word represented by a point in the embedding space, these points are learned and…
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Silken Tofu
Unless tofu is life, one would think it too much effort to ferment soy whey just to make tofu. But in East Asia, soy is life; as in elsewhere, cow milk is life. Just as folks have devised myriad ways to process cow milk, others have accumulated knowledge over millennia to turn soybeans into soy…
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Making Cheese & Tofu
I was raised on soy rather than milk. Once I grew teeth, my kiddie diet included soy milk, fried tofu, and soy sauce, but hardly any milk, and certainly no cheese. When I moved to the United States, I was surprised to find that despite the numerous tofu varieties available, none tasted like the ones…
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Yeasted Sweet Bread: The Panettone
On the other end of the yeasted sweet bread spectrum, we have the panettone, packed with eggs and butter, tower tall and impossibly fluffy like a bed of soft cloud. In the south of France, it is called the brioche aux fruits, also known as the gâteau des rois, or the Twelfth-Night cake – reserved…
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Yeasted Sweet Bread
It all started with the holiday baking project – fermenting flour, sugar, and butter into decadent, fluffy, and buttery panettoni. Yeasted sweet bread suddenly seemed so fascinating, arousing in me a desire to learn more about this mouth-watering arena of bread baking. I’ve learned to appreciate textures that only a yeasted sweet bread can give…
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Horn Salt
Horn salt, aka piss salt, is deer horns ground into salt, used as a leavening agent for baking. It does bewilder me to consider the first one to think of grinding antlers into powder, and then proceeded to add it to flour to be baked into flat breads and cookies, especially that it smells like…
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